We build JavaScript applications

Mobile Apps Building and Deployments at jsugfra[1]

This Monday we held the second iteration of our JavaScript User Group here in Frankfurt: #jsugfra (thanks Björn!)

There were only around 12 attendees there, although signups ranged around 20 - so shame on you if you didn’t show up! ;)

But it’s your loss, because aside from Evgenij’s talk you missed my “little” (1hr) hands-on session showing how you can deploy the same JS-based app - build upon Unify - to several platforms, namely those:

the browser,

homescreen (appcache on iOS) - this is different from the browser,

iOS (iPhone and iPad with PhoneGap),

Android (PhoneGap too),

BlackBerry PlayBook (WebWorks on TabletOS),

Samsung Bada (JS-App-Package),

WAC (sort of),

and Samsung Internet@TV

Unify makes this easy in many regards (JS-build process, appcache context detection etc.). My goal was to show the difficulties and differences in SDKs and build/deployment tools - this became pretty clear I think, especially talking about the difficulties. The main message I wanted to bring across this evening was:
If you want people to write apps for your platform, then given them some decent development tools!

This means preferably CLI build/deploy tools (helps with automating builds) and a well working Simulator/Emulator plus simple device deployments. If you consider these points and look at the app numbers in different stores you see what I mean:

Apple got this one right (Xcode and iOS Simulator just work, simple device deployments),

Android is behind in this (Eclipse and especially the Emulator is unusably slow, device deployment easy),

Samsung does a separate thing for different platforms and both are Eclipse-based (only Windows! WTF?, Emulators work well tho)

WAC uses the Android Emulator (cf. above) with a Widget Runtime on it and an Eclipse-based SDK (translation: slow)

Bottom line is: Many Edit->Build->Deployment chains are just so unbearably slow and/or unusable that it takes all the fun out of coding for these platforms. If you add the Appstore(tm)-submission overhead to the calculation, pure development work becomes a much smaller part in the total effort.
Sebastian also wrote in detail about the JSUG meeting itself - thanks for that!
Looking forward to jsugfra[2]